Progressively Enhanced Transcripts With jQuery

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : January 15, 2009 10:08 AM Posted In: jQuery, Ajax, Usability, JavaScript, SlideSix

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I quietly added a new feature to SlideSix earlier this week which now extracts the text contents of each slide and displays that text as a transcript on the view page of a presentation. The reason behind this enhancement is to dramatically increase the search engine visibility of your presentations since search engines will be basically indexing the content of each of your slides.

Like What You See? Now You Can Claim It!

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : January 7, 2009 10:49 AM Posted In: Usability, SlideSix

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A user sent in an interesting suggestion for SlideSix the other day. He liked that we offer the ability to upload a presentation without registering, but he thought it would be cool to give trial users the opportunity to 'claim' that presentation once they had registered.

Minor Usability Rant

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : July 10, 2008 8:43 AM Posted In: Usability

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I'm not the usability expert, but nothing annoys me more then a toolbar/menu on a site or application that has nothing but icons representing links/actions. I'll give a free pass to folks who use tooltips or some other descriptive text, but I get seriously annoyed when there is nothing but an icon/image. Other then the universal 'save/open/new' buttons (and even then there are exceptions) I usually find myself taking a wild guess as to what the little 'semi truck' icon or some other stupid icon is supposed to represent. Don't do this - it's horrible - please. </rant>

Practical Ajax - Enhancing The User Experience

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : January 16, 2008 12:20 PM Posted In: Ajax, Usability, OO, JavaScript, ColdFusion

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Ajax can be a double-edged sword of sorts. If properly done our users should really have little or no clue that any 'magic' has happened. If overdone (or implemented needlessly - a phenomenon I like to call 'Because I Can...' or 'BIC') our users can be overwhelmed, and/or confused. One of the end goals of implementing an Ajax solution is to give our users an enhanced experience with our application - or at the very least keep them from being annoyed by the experience.

Would You Consider This Bad Usability?

Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : July 17, 2007 10:52 AM Posted In: Usability

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I propose the title of this blog post as more of a question to my readers (yes it is web related so don't let the backstory fool you). Here's the story. A few weeks back my wife and I decided that we were both going to enter some baked goods into the local county fair in a friendly little competition. You see, I have bested my mother-in-law (a very decorated and proficient baker) in acquiring ribbons a few times over the past few years. So my wife decided to throw her hat in the ring this year.

So she went to the website of the county fair and submitted her entries online. A few days later I hit the same website with the same intentions and was completely stumped. It seemed pretty obvious - click on the 'Online Registration' link right from the home page - how could I screw that up? Unfortunately I kept getting a PDF version of the available categories opposed to an online entry form. I searched and searched the home page - thinking I may be missing something. Frustrated I called my wife into the room to ask her what I was doing wrong. Amazingly she pointed out that the individual category entries in the PDF were in fact hyperlinks to the entry form for that category.

So my issue here is this. While I think the overall idea here is somewhat cool - I feel this is really bad from a usability standpoint. I mean come on - I do this stuff (web development) for a living and I was stumped as to how to get to the actual entry form. At the same time my wife - who admittedly is less web savvy - found out how to enter quite easily. The biggest issue I have is that after figuring this out I went back and searched diligently for any sort of instructions that would have told me how the system worked - and found nothing. There was no text highlighting/coloring/underlining whatsoever in the PDF that indicated that the items were actual links.

Thoughts? Is it just me, or have others seen this before?